


Of Lizards and Family Matters

by ZorialDiamond



Category: Runescape
Genre: Back on the GWD2/Heart of Gielinor BS, Flashbacks, Gen, Tales of the God Wars, character backstory, headcanons ahoy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28692909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZorialDiamond/pseuds/ZorialDiamond
Summary: Silvarius, in the pursuit and development of his new scholarly life, ends up forming a number of new bonds, particularly over shared struggles with family relationships. Notably among these, a particular Illujanka and Dragonkin...
Kudos: 2





	Of Lizards and Family Matters

Silvarius Ivanov thanked Saradomin every day for Reldo’s endorsement as he worked up more and more confidence to make his way to the digsite of Senntisten, just outside Varrock. Of course, it was with a face mask and hood and bandages to hide the more egregious scars and undead flesh, and whatever he could scrounge up from his room in the Gulvas mansion to serve for casual wear, but that was beside the point. 

He wasn’t quite sure what it was about archaeology in particular that caught his interest initially. Perhaps it was simply the chance to understand more of the world that had been denied him so long. Perhaps it was something of the poetry of the dead speaking through less unsavory means than the necromancy that so marred him. Or, perhaps, it was simply because it was the only thing he could do that wouldn’t get him run out of town. Once again, thanks to a certain royal librarian’s thumbs up.

Whatever notes in his mind he’d had for what he was supposed to help with today, however, were almost immediately thrown out the window when he stepped into the examination center itself. There was another man standing there in animated conversation with one of the examiners, a harried spectacled middle-aged woman. His tanned face and greying hair visibly betrayed a world-weary soul, cloaked in purple and blue. Beside him, a lectern floating through some kind of arcane means bearing a slightly glowing tome and a metal apparatus resembling a lamp with a crystal as its head.

The examiner adjusted her glasses. “...Yes, Dr, erm, Mr. Goodman, I see how this might be...fascinating for capturing the ‘memory content’ of the wisps near the rift and in the throne room, but the resources simply aren’t present to attempt a project of that size right now.” 

“I’m not asking for anything big yet, dear lady, just a chance to attempt a proof of concept! I’d even provide most of the resources myself, I’d just need the time and space within the site itself to properly collect them!” He pleaded, seeming to hold up another tome similar to the one on the lectern.

Notes scribbled onto a clipboard. A long, deep sigh from thousands of hours of bookkeeping. “We are aware of this; we are also aware of the revoking of your privileges from the Phyrinne College of Kandarin over your previous ‘experimental’ research methods. I am sorry, Mr. Goodman-”

“Pardon me...what’s this commotion all about?” Silvarius interjected, making his presence known.

The Dr(?) Goodman turned around to address the new arrival with an outstretched hand and a smile. “Oh...I don’t believe I’ve seen you around before, young man…My name is Jeremiah Goodman, or perhaps you’ve heard of me by the name of the Curator.”

“I’m familiar with neither, but nice to meet you. I am Silvarius. I’m a newer...aspiring scholar around here.” He accepted the handshake, stiffening slightly. “What’s this you’re working on?”

Jeremiah rubbed his hands together, leaving the examiner to breathe a sigh of relief as he walked back to his prized lectern. “Well, I’ve been using some of my arcane talents to create a more immersive experience of history,” he elaborated.

“More immersive, how? This just looks like a book to me,” Silvarius inquired. Of course, he could tell it was magical, but his arcane training was unfortunately more in the maiming department.

The Curator gripped the strange crystal tipped apparatus, and brought it closer to the page, where previously invisible images manifested. “You know what they say...showing is better than just telling in words...and with this, memories can be captured straight from the source itself, if you know how to look for them!” A slight wink, as he put the arm back in its place.

Silvarius approached, carefully handling the tome in his bandaged fingers. “Interesting...I’ve heard of arts like those before, though maybe not as precisely applied as this. What sort of memories are captured in this tome then?” 

Mr. Goodman brushed some dust off his cloak before breathing in deeply. “Well, I figured I’d start with memories that were a bit fresher by comparison...and a story with a bit of spice to really hook people in.” He now started to gesticulate more animatedly, seemingly for a much wider audience that only existed in his imagination. “All the personalities and drama around one of the recent conflicts of this the second God Wars...deep beneath the earth in Gielinor’s very Heart!”

Silvarius’s eyes shot wide open, and he accidentally lurched closer to the lectern.   
“The Heart of Gielinor…?” A long, protracted pause, half anticipation, half hesitation. “...You have my attention, Mr. Goodman.”

“I do, do I? Very well then...if you’re ready...let us dive into the first of several tales…” He turned to the start of the tome, and placed down the crystalline apparatus onto the page. And as Silvarius looked into the images on the pages...he was there.

There in some oddly teal-grassed, almost enchantedly evergreen forested surroundings, with some very familiarly green and gold armored elves. Talk of scouting...making it as far as the city the digsite now stood on...and another quite familiar face, though not necessarily in the form the Heart was most familiar with him in. Garbed in dark navy, cyan furs, and a face veiled through hood and mask much like his own now. Helwyr. 

And of course, rage at the experiments of a _certain wretched bastard_ he knew all too well, trying to steal the secrets of the elves’ long life. Rage that if he weren’t aware that this memory was likely happening several generations before his own existence, he would have believed it was directed at him by proxy.

Almost as if on clue, the aquamarine smoky glows took the Cywir hunter into the much more familiar cerulean lupine visage, whose roaring declaration of vengeance made him jump back somewhat in the physical world. He looked at Mr. Goodman, who seemed to lean over the lectern in anticipation.

"This is...truly astonishing." Silvarius replied, once he properly regained his sense of his present surroundings. ”It’s like I really was right there.”

"I am glad you think so, young man." The dark-robed gentleman calling himself the Curator smiled. "There are more chapters in this story however. Certainly you would like to know what happened to the one Helwyr was pursuing? You need only turn to the next chapter."

Silvarius froze. That scent. That scent of darkness and decay was faint, but all too familiar. His claws trembled, gripping the book. He took a deep breath. 

"...Indeed. It is quite a riveting story. Much as reading words can enlighten, it is another thing to personally bear witness," he remarked.

_Could it be...Could I see the truth here?_ the wight wondered to himself. _Do...do I want to know?_

"Are you alright, Silvarius?" Mr. Goodman approached, putting a hand on his shoulder. "If viewing the memories is this intensive, I might have to be more careful..."

"You don't need to worry," Silvarius remarked, then drawing the crystal's beam to the page. A deep breath.

And suddenly the surroundings shifted, and the tunnels of the Barrows appeared around him.

 _"Sliske, the sickness tightens its grip. My time is almost up._ ”

The gravelly voice that spoke was unfamiliar in tone, but not in character. Uttered from a lanky, well dressed man. A properly trimmed suit, well-cleaned glasses, a fashionable choice of headwear. 

" _Ahhh, Gregorovic, crawling back as I suspected. Honestly, I thought you would last longer."_ His now late master, little more than two yellow pinpricks of eyes wreathed in purple and shadow from the view. No, this was not a delusion. 

The man appeared to ruffle in one of his pockets for something. " _I really thought the elves would hold the answer. I even caught some strays from the Cywir clan_." 

That casual treatment of abject horror. No, it did not have the same mad laughter or revelry, but he could not deny it.

_How long have I spent wondering, and now the answer is before me, and yet I disbelieve it still..._

Now he was utterly transfixed. Despair tinged the man, no, Gregorovic's words. Everything slipping away, despite his best efforts. Perhaps what surprised him was that the impetus was simple fear. Survival. 

“Yet nothing justifies the blood you shed” _,_ Silvarius half muttered under his breath.

" _Do with me what you will, Mahjarrat. Only deliver me from the shadow of Death._ " If he were not prostrate in form, he certainly was in words.

The next moment, he watched as a bolt of terrible lightning struck down his ancestor to the echoing of Sliske's laughter, and he winced as if he himself were struck too.

Now he viewed the perpetual overcast of the Morytanian sky, and he could almost smell it, too. Sliske beckoned. The monster he knew all too well rose, quickly embracing his new nature.

"...Young man, are you alright?" 

When Silvarius came to again, he looked up at a Jeremiah Goodman whose face was tense with worry. He just realized he was on the floor, and the scholar was lifting him up.

"I....I'll be fine..." he muttered.

"I apologize. I got so carried away with my discovery that I did not consider the effects such an immersive experience could have on certain sorts of individuals. It seems there is still work I need to do." He sat the 'young man' on a stool.

"No, I don't think that is it. It is less the memories themselves and more...me." Silvarius replied, breathing deeply. "I can explain more after the rest of the viewi-"

The Curator held up a hand. "You don't have to rush yourself, Silvarius. If it isn't safe for you, it is not safe." 

"...I can explain why, but I would prefer we do it in private," he whispered.

"If you feel so inclined..." 

Luckily, there was no want of secluded locations around the Digsite at Senntisten; behind the exam hall between the wall and the hedges was the one they chose.

"So...why do you suspect you reacted the way you did?" Mr. Goodman said.

"It is because of who I am, Mr. Goodman." He breathed, closing his eyes, looking down, opening them, tapping his claws, before looking up at the historian once again. "The memory did not tell you the rest of the name of Gregorovic, but I know it. Ivanov. I know it because it is my own. He is my ancestor."

For a moment, only the muffled sounds of studying students could be heard as Jeremiah gathered his thoughts in silence.

"I see....So it was your own history that caused it...it seems there are more pieces to these tales that I do not know. But I will not make you tell them to me," the Curator responded. "I myself have many memories I would rather not think upon."

"I have had no one to talk to about this for a long time. Many times longer than an ordinary human would, as a matter of fact," Silvarius disclosed almost too nonchalantly. “Naturally, my knowledge of the conflict in question was from the inside. It wasn’t my choice, and I defected the first second I could get free of it.”

“If I didn’t know any better, Silvarius, I’d say that this was a nice old stroke of fate that we met,” the Curator observed, adjusting the hem of his own hood.

“Indeed, I sense you too have suffered unjustly for good intentions,” the wight mused, offering a slight smile in his eyes. “Perhaps there is no better ear for a lost soul than another lost soul."

“Mmmm…I see. That makes sense,” he said, as the two strolled back to the examination site proper, taking seats near the lectern, a profound silence between them.

“I think I am ready to continue,” Silvarius said, picking up the crystal-tipped apparatus of the reader once again.

The next memory, a different level of familiar. The Furies. Nymora in her vengeful reds, Avaryss in her chilling blues, two thirds of a triplet, stood before their god. Blade like wings, agile and vicious. A mix of mourning, pleading and vengeance. Ah yes, another he knew all too well. The image of the mangled visage of their fallen sister that intruded as the display ended was a memory he was very quick to press down in his mind once again.

“Ah yes, them...I saw something of the incident they described. A horrific sight...and one they still don’t forgive my tangential involvement in.” Even now he glanced over his shoulder, ready to summon some kind of shadowy weapon to defend himself against one of their agents.

“...I’m not going to even pretend I can understand living with that kind of paranoia,” Jeremiah commented, looking aside with more than a bit of a concerned expression. 

“Fortunately, I think this next memory won’t have the same problem the others do for me...hopefully, anyhow. Knock on wood.” For one last time, Silvarius put the reading crystal to the arcane tome.

The memory of the Zarosian general was the only one of the lot he could view with any real sense of academic objectivity. Of course it was, it was the only one Gregorovic’s smarmy hands hadn’t directly touched.

Though, it wasn’t a memory that explicitly started with the dragon rider herself...rather, within a chamber of odd green stone, a rather elegantly armored turquoise-scaled dragon he was more familiar with through intelligence briefings than personal experience: Gorvek. A dragon that was brooding over some sort of egg like a mother hen.

A mother hen that was very intent on empowering this new, and perhaps last generation to right past wrongs. A deep, snarling voice that seemed to echo in his mind.

“ _One day, you will have your vengeance. They will call you...Vindicta._ ”

Recovered armor. A life of blades, surrounded by the scales and wings of dragons. Affixed armor, in dark teal trimmed with gold. Twin, elaborate blades held high, and at one’s side. A pride in one’s blood that was so utterly foreign to him...and a rage over shed blood that was all too familiar. She emerged from the caverns, the clanks of the ancestral armor like death bells for her foes.

“ _Nymora...Avaryss...The Furies...you will pay in blood for what you have done to my race. To my family.”_

Blades turned up, swiping down, as if to mime slicing off their wings and bisecting them both in one fell swoop.

_“I will not rest until you sleep beneath the earth. I am coming for you._ ”   
  
And with that, the ‘father’ she’d best known took her to the skies to make the wish real.

It took him a moment once again to shake himself back to his reality, though much quicker this time. “Well, I can’t say the Sisters were particularly good, just not as bad as the bastard…” he muttered to himself, before turning back to the Curator with a start.

“Thank you, Mr. Goodman, this has been...enlightening. Some...level of odd closure? I don’t know.” The wight responded, absentmindedly turning the page on the enchanted tome.

“Ah, but there’s one more...one of them all together.” Jeremiah clapped his hands together, beaming from beneath his hood.

“The one of them all on the platform, yelling at each other? I vaguely remember being on the sidelines of that...maybe later,” Silvarius replied. “I suppose now I understand a bit more of what they were yelling about. At the time, I was mostly focused on how my own ‘boss’ was a bastard,” he quipped.

“Fair enough, fair enough,” Mr. Goodman chuckled somewhat, and patted Silvarius on the shoulder. “I cannot stress enough how much this all means to me...well, not-so-young man.”

“You as well, Mr. Goodman...I’d say you live up to your name, in spite of what others think.” Another ever so slight smile from the wight, as simultaneously slight and as monumental as the shifting plates of the earth. “If you want to chat more in the future, you can ask for me at the Gulvas Manor.”  
  
“So that’s where you’re staying. eh...I’ll certainly keep it in mind. I hope your new path finds you well, Mr. Ivanov.” A smile, and a wave, as the Curator packed his things.

“I think it will, Mr. Goodman. Good luck to you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hooray, the start of a new fic, though it's more of a prologue to the more Proper Lizard Business canon's been up to lately; I promise this will make more sense later. Going back in time a bit to when Silvarius was just starting out his scholarly career, meeting a minor NPC, namely the Curator, that I have now thoroughly adopted and crafted a stupid amount of headcanon for. These are ideas I've had knocking around for a while, but I've been inspired to revisit them by semi-recent canon. And by that I mean within the past two years or so. I can't keep up with my own daydreaming pace, sigh...
> 
> Did I mention how stupidly hard it is to figure out how to tag characters that only appear in a flashback? Even with the rule of thumb of "If they have any level of spoken dialogue in the fic itself". In any case, Tales of the God Wars is a miniquest that has a special place in my heart, and Zori is back on her GWD2/Heart of Gielinor BS again, for better or worse! (more on that, in the next chapter...)
> 
> I know I have other fics that I need to work on, fortunately I've got all the notes nicely outlined for whenever I can get to them!


End file.
